Tuesday Tips: 10 Ways to Enjoy the Ride of Life

Welcome to Tuesday Tips, a weekly list of ideas for living a positive lifestyle. Get ready for some hot touchy-feely action, because this week is all about self-love and feeling the way you want to feel.

1. Make a list of 99 things you loved about your day.
This is deliberate creation: remembering, emphasizing, growing and focusing on the parts of your life that are going well for you. Bonus: You can list things you want to happen and they will. Just think of something that would be a next logical step (something you can believe would actually happen) and then imagine yourself writing it down as if you had already done it. It's like a magickal to-do list.

3. Use the ultimate "stop-thinking" trifecta if you're stuck in negative thought patterns.
Focus your eyes on a single point. Breathe in and count to seven. Breathe out for seven more counts. Repeat until you stop thinking and start feeling better. For me, this method instantly calms me down and resets me into the Now. Focus, breathe, count.

4. Play life like a video game.
I dreamt I was playing poker. The less I cared about winning, the more chips I stacked, because I was having so much fun playing. Can you remember that feeling? I remember playing Sonic the Hedgehog and getting so into the flow of each level that collecting rings was never a priority, but I always racked 'em up. I didn't care about dying, because I could always start over. Visualize that feeling of playing a video game for pleasure and associate that feeling with playing life and you'll never have a problem collecting rings.

5. Roll with the punches."If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?" ~Rumi
Life is so long. There are so many ups and downs. If you focus on the ups and downs, you'll get seasick. Another approach is to settle into the rhythm of the flow of life, which basically means don't freak out when things don't go your way. When you're in a dip, you're learning what you want so it can be created. The sooner you're ok with the dip, the sooner you can take the ride back up.

6. Feeling down anyway?
Try not to care if you feel good or not. Don't chase the feeling. If you're chasing the feeling, it's not the feeling. The feeling you're after is the exact opposite—the feeling of letting it come to you. As soon as you stop caring about how you don't feel good, you'll realize you already do. It's like a dog chasing his tail. You don't have to do anything to feel good. It's part of you already. To stop that painful feeling of chasing, use the "stop-thinking" trifecta described in #3.

7. Stop self-censorship and replace it with self-love.
Twinkie Chan's post on the neutering of her blog really inspired me. Sometimes I feel weird about being myself online, and in the past I've censored myself. I asked Kelly her perspective and it blew me away:

I'm being open and honest with who I am. Part of who I am is how I feel about people I write about. And no one reading what I wrote would ever feel bad about it, because it's 100% honesty. It has no choice but to feel good. It's love. The only thing I would ever say is purely positive. I always picture the people I write about reading my site. I know they do. Because I'm creating them. They're my little puppets and they need to know. My writing is a gift that I am sharing with the world. I'm not asking for anything. It's generosity. And when you believe in your work wholeheartedly, you know that.

8. Give yourself the attention you want from others.
When I'm mad crushing on someone and start feeling bad when they don't pay attention to me, I simply give myself the love I'm looking for. I say to myself, "I love you, Jessica." The less I'm thinking about wanting someone else's attention, the more I get it.

9. Ask yourself, "What would I do if I weren't afraid?"

10. Kill time.
Leo at Zen Habits has a great perspective on time. Instead of packing every moment with planned activity, just ask yourself, “How can I best enjoy this moment?”